my dream job.

People always comment how happy I must be to have my dream job.  And I think... I love being a photographer but it was never actually my dream job.  But if I look back at my life, I was always headed in that direction.  So I suppose me and photography were always meant to be.

The first camera I owned was a tiny camera that came from a cereal box.  (Didn't you just love finding the prizes in cereal boxes?!) That first camera was very basic.  You'd snap the film on to the camera, and shoot away!  I loved pictures.  As a child I'd thumb through National Geographic's and imagine traveling around the world taking pictures.  But even then, my dream was to become a teacher.  I continued to want to be a teacher, with brief dreams of becoming a lawyer or a fireman, until high school.

In high school I had no idea what I wanted to do.  By then I owned an olympus point-and-shoot film camera that I brought with me wherever I was.  I took pictures of EVERYTHING.  I loved photography.  I tried to get into the photography class, but was rejected.  I was on the yearbook staff, but even then I got rejected.  I became a copywriter and secretly longed to be one of the photographers.  At that point, I had a good eye and knew a good picture when I saw it.  I had a strong creative background and knew that somehow I had the potential to be good at photography.   But even then I never committed to the idea of becoming a photographer.  While I was interested in photography, I put photography on the back-burner; I imagined I'd do it on the side or when I was a stay-at-home-mom.  (Imagine, I wanted to be one of those mom-tographers. haha.)

When I applied to colleges I still didn't know what to do.  I applied to colleges in graphic design, graphic communications, architecture and aviation.  When it was time to pick a college I chose architecture over becoming a pilot.  Notice how I didn't even consider photography?  haha.  That senior year in high school I was taking endless amount of pictures (and still couldn't get into the photography class).  I continued to take pictures whenever I could.  I wanted everything documented.

In college I absolutely loved architecture.  I loved everything about it.  It appealed to my technical and artistic interests.  I learned a lot and loved it.  As part of my architecture projects I needed to take pictures a lot.  I had to photograph the sites of my projects, my research, my process and my final models.  During that time I learned a lot about what appealed to my photographic eye.  I look back on some of those pictures and they still appeal to me.  As part of my architecture program, I even learned photo editing.  We had an assignment where we were given a digital file of an old picture scanned on a dirty scanner and had to fix the color and clean up the image.  It was great.  I continued to take pictures well after graduating college, and still it had not occurred to me to make a career out of photography.

Now that I am a photographer, I think it's pretty funny that photography as a career never occurred to me.  To me it was always some lofty idea that I'd do somewhere done the road, I suppose.   Cameras and photography were always a constant in my life so I don't know what I was thinking!  I love being a photographer.  I love my life.  I love photography found me.

So what's your dream job?  Has it found you yet?